Professor Cheryl Harris notes a time period during which the United States experienced a simultaneous expansion of the right to vote for white voters and the contraction of the right to vote for African Americans:
Open Link“[On the eve of the Civil War], the franchise . . . was broadened to extend voting rights to unpropertied white men at the same time that Black voters were specifically disenfranchised, arguably shifting the property required for voting from land to whiteness.”